For a few weeks, I casually played Return of the Obra Dinn with one of my partners. It was a Christmas gift they got me, and dang it, it was a good gift. It was a game that made me feel like we were a detective duo, finding hidden truths among increasingly obscure clues. Now: this was supposed to just be a break game for me. I don’t want to be that girl that turns everything he enjoys in their spare time into Content. But also, due to real life problems I’ve been open with, I’m a boy with free time to burn, so why not turn it into Content anyway? Besides, let’s take a little break from The House in Fata Morgana.

Return of the Obra Dinn was primarily developed by Lucas Pope, who was also developer behind early indie hit Papers, Please. The year is 1807, and a lost ship, the Obra Dinn has been located. You are a claims adjuster (no relation to Luigi) who’s tasked to just kinda figure out the dozens of deaths that have happened to do insurance right.

But it’s not boring insurance work. You were given a special gift: the manifest of the boat and a pocketwatch that takes you into a flashback to witness the last moments of any dead thing you interact with. You start out with finding the dead body of somebody that led an attempted mutiny against the captain in the last moments of the boat. You work your way through the deaths until the one where the captain kills himself. Then you interact with a body near the captain’s, and it becomes clear how daunting and weird of a job recording the deaths of everyone on the Obra Dinn truly is.

One of the first things to note about Return of the Obra Dinn is its art style. The game is entirely one-bit with a strong use of dithering to shade things in. It’s a strong art style that fits the mysterious vibes of the game and gives it a dated look that feels befitting of the date of the setting. Furthermore, it makes some details murkier, which kinda adds to the game’s difficulty, I feel.

On that note: you’re figuring out who’s who and how they died. Puzzling things out starts simple, with characters saying names and titles in dialogue. Then you might have to figure out who characters are based on their outfit, who they hung around with throughout their memories, and race indicators. But it gradually gets harder. It reaches a point where you have to travel to the last moments of dead people just to look around for background context clues that’d help you identify other unrelated people. For me, identifying the last two people really just came down to finding the differences between their shoes, and the only clue to the identities of those shoe owners was a memory of a guy that died of a mundane illness before any of the crazy shit started happening.

On that note: shout out to Solomen Syed, who died in a place where a bunch of clues were hiding. You were a real one for dying of an unrelated illness, thank you.

I gotta say, your character may just be a mere insurance claims adjuster, but in my eyes, you’re a detective. Besides figuring out deaths to the more fantastical elements, you’re solving deaths resulting from crimes. Figuring out who died is one thing, but figuring out who killed them is another, harder goal. My partner and I? We were like some task force investigating these murders. I think your player character could solve the Kira case, to be honest.

Alongside investigating these deaths, you’re also piecing together the wider story of the Obra Dinn with the various snapshots of the dead. It’s a strong narrative full of tragic accidents, mutiny, and hostile undersea creatures. What’s interesting is that because of the presentation of the story, there’s a lot of things left unsaid to speculate about. Particularly, what was the reason for the final mutiny that’s the first thing you bear witness to, way after all the stranger tragedies? Your character may never know because it’s not important to their actual insurance job, but it’s something for the players to think about for themselves. What’s exactly the deal with this pocketwatch and why does one of the few survivors have it? The easy answer is “who cares?” but it’d be fun to think about, especially since Pope originally wanted Obra Dinn to be the first in a series.

But there’s a particularly big mystery: there’s one chapter of the book locked off to the inspector, as well as two people whose fates are completely unaccounted for. Are you truly interested in these mysteries and want some closure? Better get good at solving everyone’s fates, then.

There’s… really not a lot to say about Return of the Obra Dinn that other people haven’t already said. Alas, such is the pain of writing about something already well-known. But for me, writing this was a good way to think about what I just played through, and I can easily say this is a damn good game. If you haven’t played it yet, you should. I actually invite you to play this with someone over Discord like I did. Being a detective with someone was fun and it makes for a good bonding experience.